History of Islam in Africa by Levtzion Nehemia; Pouwels Randall;

History of Islam in Africa by Levtzion Nehemia; Pouwels Randall;

Author:Levtzion, Nehemia; Pouwels, Randall;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-03-07T16:00:00+00:00


It was at Tabora and Ujiji in the central interior that the greatest Muslim settlements developed. Ujiji, located on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, was an important staging point for trade across the lake; Tabora, some 180 miles south of Lake Victoria and 200 miles east of Lake Tanganyika, was strategically located in a well-watered fertile region at the crucial junction where the central trade route split into two branches, one proceeding west to Ujiji, the other north, around the western shores of Lake Victoria, to terminate in Buganda.

To ensure the smooth operation of their affairs, the Arab and Swahili merchants sought to forge solid alliances with local rulers. The rulers expected their coastal allies to supply them with the firearms they needed to defend themselves from the attacks of hostile neighbors or to help them organize the conquest of new territory. In turn, the providers of firearms benefited by sharing the booty seized in battle: prisoners of war or stocks of ivory. These alliances were sometimes sealed by the marriage of a trader to the daughter of an influential elder or chief. Such marriages took place at both Tabora and Ujiji.

In the 1840s at Tabora, the trader Muhammad bin Juma, a Muslim of mixed Omani and African descent, married a daughter of Fundikira I, the ntemi (ruler or chief) of Unyanyembe, one of the two main chiefdoms of Unyamwezi. The Arab-Swahili community helped Fundikira I in several armed clashes with his neighbors. By the 1860s, Tabora had grown into the most important of the Muslim settlements of the central interior, and the local liwali, the official representative of the sultan, had established his residence there. However, Islamic influence at Tabora was mitigated by various circumstances, and Muhammad bin Juma’s marriage to Fundikira’s daughter had no broad repercussions on Nyamwezi society. In 1858, it was overshadowed by the violent conflict that broke out between the Arabs and Mnywa Sele, Fundikiras successor.71 The Nyamwezi, who were themselves trading competitors of the Arabs and the Swahili, kept the Muslims confined to Tabora town, where few Nyamwezi were resident.

The rise to power in the late 1860s of another Nyamwezi chief, Mirambo, who was hostile to Unyanyembe and opposed to the presence and influence of the Muslim traders there, changed the circumstances of much of Unyamwezi. Mirambo’s raiding campaigns severely disrupted trade and constrained the activities of many of the coastal traders. Unsympathetic to the Zanzibaris, the redoubtable Mirambo (called by some a “black Napoleon”) knew how to play to his advantage the rivalry between them and the Christian missionaries, who first arrived in the Tabora region in 1879. According to a description of the town in the 1880s, there were no Nyamwezi living within three miles of Tabora, where the Arabs and Swahili stayed with their Islamized Manyema slaves, and the town had become as much a plantation as a trading settlement.72

To all these circumstances must be added a further, less tangible and definable, factor—the apparent general lack of interest among most Muslim traders in spreading their religion.



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